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Chess Minigames for Enjoyable Learning [pdf]

160 points by andytratt 5y ago

cjohnson318 5y ago
This is great, it reminds me of an old Bobby Fischer book I had years ago that taught chess by studying endgames first, instead of openings, which is similar to these minigames. I like that these minigames are more focused on exploring chess, than just simulating possible endgames.
- kqr 5y ago
  That is an interesting idea! I wonder if it would work for go too. There are fewer rules to learn, but the situations can get rather complicated too.
  - cjohnson318 5y ago
    There's a term for go minigames in Chinese, but I don't recall it. You might enjoy this site: https://senseis.xmp.net/?ProblemsAndExercises https://senseis.xmp.net/?ProblemsAndExercises
    - kqr 5y ago
      Tsumego is probably the term you are looking for. I have an app with lots of them on my phone. I was talking specifically about using them to teach the rules, which is not something I've heard of so far.
- aasasd 5y ago
  As a person perpetually stuck on the ‘total beginner’ phase, I really have no idea how one would start learning chess by beginning with openings. As I imagine it, one first learns to recognize good moves three levels forward, then four and five, until full positions start making sense quicker—and ‘endgames’ are a natural fit for this, since they involve just a few pieces and lead to an unambiguous checkmate. Puzzles, like in some phone apps, work pretty well this way. But openings are a complete opposite of this. (I mean, I understand that in any case one proceeds to learn the overall game by memorizing hundreds of openings and training to recognize patterns at once, and then by dumping full-time evenings into cranking up the rating. Which is why I decided that I'm fine with the beginner status.)
  - xedrac 5y ago
    Memorizing openings is dubious at best, unless you're already a very strong player. Most chess coaches will actively discourage studying the opening until the you've become sufficiently good at the more impactful aspects of the game. Things like, awareness of the board, not hanging pieces, king safety, tactical pattern recognition, calculating 2-3 moves in advance with precision, attacking, defending, basic endgames, time management, basic strategy, and instincts. Memorization, without understanding, is mostly useless in Chess.
  - alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    Give Lichess a go (mobile or website). It's got unlimited puzzles and has helped me tremendously and doesn't get monotonous
  - hardwaregeek 5y ago
    Ehh endgames can quickly go from easy, a beginner could do it, to insane theory that IMs struggle with. Mating with a Queen? Easy. Mating with a rook? Sure. Bishop knight? That’s pretty rough. Knight knight vs pawn? Even Hikaru struggles with that one in blitz.
- andytratt 5y ago
  thanks for the positive feedback! warms my heart <3 :)
raj2569 5y ago
This is awesome. Mini games are easy fun and very quick, and a great way to start chess!
- andytratt 5y ago
  thanks for the comment! super glad to hear about awesomeness :)
wyclif 5y ago
This is a helpful little book, so thanks @andytratt. One thing I think you should add in future editions is an illustration for en passant. You illustrate things like the knight move but IMO en passant is harder for beginners to understand without an illustration.
- fvrghl 5y ago
  Holy hell
  - andytratt 5y ago
    indeed
    - wyclif 5y ago
      Sorry, my bad. I didn't think to look in the minigame section for the fundamental moves and assumed they were all in the front matter.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  En passant is illustrated on p. 14, in the discussion of pawn movement in the Pawn Wars minigame.
  - andytratt 5y ago
    Thanks you! Yes I intentionally buried the piece movement explanations after each minigame, trying to keep focus on the sequence of minigames and letting folks skip over the piece movements in case they already knew them a priori.
xedrac 5y ago
As a fellow lover of the game of Chess, and owner of several hundred Chess books, this is a great little starter book. I'm always fascinated at how Chess can completely satisfy my need for intellectual stimulation and competition, and it never gets old. It has the ultimate replay-ability factor. I fully expect to play and study the game for the rest of my life. Thank you for being delusional like me. :)
- toomanydoubts 5y ago
  >I'm always fascinated at how Chess can completely satisfy my need for intellectual stimulation and competition, and it never gets old. It has the ultimate replay-ability factor. I really love chess, gotten into it back in 2018 and learned a lot. Since mid 2020 I got into the bad habit of just playing 1+0 bullet games mindlessly without caring about the result just to shake off the boredom. Always repeating the same old openings and attempting the same old boring traps. I wish I could get back to that "never gets old plus ultimate replay-ability factor", maybe I should start taking on 15+15 games back again.
  - raptorraver 5y ago
    I know what you mean, although my drug of choice is 3 minutes blitz. Lately I’ve gotten into letter chess on Lichess. It’s nice to be able to really analyze position and possible variations. Games last for days and weeks and you get emotionally committed to win those, or get even draw after horrible blunder.
  - hutrdvnj 5y ago
    Often you don't have or don't want to spend the uninterrupted time to play a 15+15 match, this is why bullet and blitz are so popular. For those I recommend correspondence chess (e.g. on Lichess). This form of chess is asynchronously, so whenever you have some time, like waiting for the bus, you can deeply think about a chess position of your chess game. After a game I would recommend to analyze the game and learn from your mistakes in the opening, middlegame, endgame, missed tactics and so on. These games are much more meaningful than blitz games, where you obviously might have just lost a game due to a knight fork you hadn't seen because of few seconds left on your clock. Correspondence games will help you to understand chess more deeply, fix your own mistakes and to become an overall better player. You can also open many correspondence games in parallel, this way you don't have to wait for days until you can make another move.
infologics 5y ago
[dead]
raptorraver 5y ago
I’ve been trying to teach my 5 yo kid to play chess. He’s very enthusiastic but there seems to be so many things to learn so he sometimes feels overwhelmed. Today I’m going to test some of the minigames in the book! Very nice, thanks for the author :)
- andytratt 5y ago
  Yay! Good luck, hope it works out! If the enthusiasm can be channeled, then that's great. The minigames should keep him from getting overwhelmed. But 5 can be hard sometimes, and if focus isn't there yet, just wait a bit and try at 6 :) Thanks for commenting, makes me smile!
NKosmatos 5y ago
A nice small book to introduce someone to chess, especially the minigames. I’d like more of them. I know of one, but don’t know the name of it. You start with all black pieces on their positions and then with only one white knight (whoever you want, it’s symmetrical) you try to take all the black pieces in the lowest number of moves. My niece showed me this small exercise but I can’t recall the name if it and I was unable to find it online. On my todo list, to create a simple webpage with this mini game (along with other small/easy ones) where young players do practice and also keep their scores/time on a leaderboard per game ;-)
- andytratt 5y ago
  Thanks, amazing, yes please make interactive things!! I always wanted to turn this into a site and put more of them, but my limited programming patience only led to a basic diagram generator (http://andytrattner.com/chessboard/ http://andytrattner.com/chessboard/) for the written page :( Different configurations to hop knights around are great. I recall https://acornchess.com/ https://acornchess.com/ has some more of these. They didn't have cloud-based stuff nor social / leaderboards if I recall, it was all local desktop and behind paywall. The opportunity is there to create better things! P.S. this site also has some more stuffs - https://www.chessvideos.tv/endgame-training/endgame-simulations.php https://www.chessvideos.tv/endgame-training/endgame-simulati...
somenameforme 5y ago
For some more chess candy, here [1] is a video of Magnus Carlsen, current world champion (and arguably the strongest player of all time), playing a bunch of exceptionally strong players in a 2.5 hour blitz (3 minutes for each side) session while also giving some exceptionally insightful commentary. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjv1-14-SuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjv1-14-SuU
- andytratt 5y ago
  magnus is just magnificent
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago
"Even though chess has been around for well over a thousand years, good introductory teaching doesn't exist. So far, nobody has survived chess baptism without scars. Are you ready to join me in making history?" Hyperbole much? Guides, books, teachers have been around as long as chess have [1] so to suggest that none of these provide a 'good introductory teaching' is somewhat hubristic. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Ram%C3%ADrez_de_Lucena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Ram%C3%ADrez_de_Lucena
- andytratt 5y ago
  "Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. In rhetoric, it is also sometimes known as auxesis. In poetry and oratory, it emphasizes, evokes strong feelings, and creates strong impressions. As a figure of speech, it is usually not meant to be taken literally." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole) Yes, absolutely correct, I used hyperbole :) I kind of want to truncate my response to the above. I will respond in more detail, not to be defensive, but because perhaps there is a misunderstanding that can be rectified here. This expressive passage was not meant to convey hubris. I genuinely have yet to find a text which comprehensively introduces the game in a fun way, as mine does. You will see in other comments that folks often have chess sets lying around, but they struggle to engage those around them or teach the game engagingly. The tone of that paragraph is born from a very real, very modern, and very frustrating experience. Most books that "teach" chess are things like My System, which presumes some familiarity with the game and its rules, and is also just super dry. Josh Waitzkin's Attacking Chess was great as an intro to tactics, but not to the piece movements or chess itself as a whole. There are no other resources I have seen which effectively employ minigames, except perhaps IM Herman Grooten's recommended "Steps Method" (https://www.stappenmethode.nl/en/ https://www.stappenmethode.nl/en/). After speaking with IM Grooten, I decided that their approach, while great for the classroom and extremely comprehensive, is not encapsulated in a form that non-chess instructors would find worth paging through and implementing in their lives or with their loved ones. As an aside, I think Lucena's book was written so long ago that some of the rules (pawn double-step, en passant, long-range queen movement, castling) may not have been the same. I haven't read it, and I don't know anyone who has, so I can't say for sure. Wikipedia hints at this. I really can't say where the counterexample is, because I haven't found good introductory teaching. Lichess has great learning modules, which can take someone from zero knowledge to decent player in a great engaging way. But that's not well-explained to a parent or beginner who isn't quite self-motivated to dig through hardcore chess stuff on their own. For those in the autodidact demographic, my book is irrelevant for sure, and perhaps that includes you. Other resources those folks might find more useful (the kind who want lists of source material instead of some hubristic author opining) I have listed here: https://andytrattner.com/chess https://andytrattner.com/chess
erfgh 5y ago
I don't understand the appeal of chess for the average player. Unless you are advanced (over 2000 elo) there is nothing really "deep" about it. It's like solving simple puzzles and you have to think like a computer, simply evaluating moves and responses. As GM Ben Finegold said, when you show a sub-2000 player what he did wrong he's not surprised; he just didn't see it, didn't calculate it. Yes, if you reach 2000 elo the game becomes very strategic but 99% of people won't reach that due to not being able to play thousands and thousands of games and/or not doing so early enough in their life. Can you play just for fun when you are below 2000? Yes you can but it's not much fun because in most games players will blunder and at that point the game pretty much gets decided; you can blunder at any point, you can never relax, you can never play a move and be confident that you didn't blunder. The constant struggle to be ultra-focused on your calculation quickly wears you down and makes the game tiring and stressful.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  there's a lot of pleasure in mechanical exercise, it's the reason people go to the gym or play starcraft. You don't really need to be good at chess to get fun out of calculating chess moves. It's true that it's like solving puzzles, but puzzles are very popular! It's like working out for your brain. Even at the GM level by the way chess is really 99% tactics. It's not like some 4X strategy game, it's by its nature almost always concrete. And because everyone can blunder at low level play a blunder doesn't mean you lose the game. It's with higher ELO that the game starts to become more punishing. And you definitely can get to a good strength as an adult. 2000 is strong club level, which if you really want to do it is a few years of dedicated training. And even at your average club rating of say 1700-1800 you can play decent games.
- thom 5y ago
  On the one hand yes, I find chess a miserable hobby sometimes for these exact reasons. On the other hand, I think it’s been a hugely valuable life lesson and a boon to my focus and willpower. But I don’t understand how you can think chess isn’t satisfying to weaker players. An attack that comes off, even if it’s unsound, is one of the most beautiful things in gaming for me.
- MagnumOpus 5y ago
tromp 5y ago
When teaching Go, a popular mini-game is capture-Go, with the winner being the first to capture an opponent's stone. But these Chess mini-games gave me an idea for an even simpler one. Starting from an empty board, place your stone so that it's not adjacent to any opponent stone. The first player unable to do so loses. I guess it could be called Avoid Contact. This is first of all a good way to learn the distinction between 4-connectedness and 8-connectedness., while avoiding the intricacies of captures. But it can also teach players a bit about forming territory, since building a chain 2 steps from the edge creates a safe space for your own stones. Now that I think about it, this is so obvious that it should already be known. If so, does anyone have a reference for it?
- tromp 5y ago
  Thinking about it some more, this game has a big flaw. One of the players has a simple winning strategy by mirroring (actually 180 degree rotation) the other player's moves. On an n x n board, the 1st player wins if n is odd (by starting in the middle), and the 2nd player wins if n is even. Changing to a rectangular m x n board, with m+n odd, doesn't help. The 1st player still wins by playing on one of the 2 central points followed by mirroring. While this flaw prevent Avoid Contact from being a good game in its own right, it still seems to make an excellent introduction to Go. Praised be those students that can discover the mirroring strategy by themselves. And then they will appreciate Go all the more as they learn how to defeat the mirroring strategy there... The next chance I get to teach someone Go, it will be in this order: Avoid Contact -> Capture Go -> Go
  - tromp 5y ago
    There are some ways to deal with the mirroring flaw. The following assume odd-sized square boards. In one, the 1st player is forbidden from starting in the center. The other gives the 2nd player the option of switching sides after the first stone is played.
    - andytratt 5y ago
      nice
app4soft 5y ago
Tile should be next: > Chess Minigames for Enjoyable Learning (2021) [pdf]
- andytratt 5y ago
  got it, thanks, too late to modify it seems :(
mrpotato 5y ago
A year or two ago I bought my nephew a chess board/game and since then I've been struggling figuring out how I can teach him the game effectively. He seems to prefer playing on ipad/phone because he can see the legal moves. I'm going to use these mini games the next time we play to help him learn the piece movements a litle better. This is great!
- andytratt 5y ago
  yay!
marttt 5y ago
To OP: I was just looking into simple chess puzzles for my son (checkmate in two etc), so this popping up on HN front page is excellent. Many thanks for your work! Would you mind also providing an epub version of it? Apparently, there's also another booklet on your homepage, "How to Teach Your Child Chess" [1]. Will look into that one as well. 1: https://andytrattner.com/img/pdf/teach-chess.pdf https://andytrattner.com/img/pdf/teach-chess.pdf
- andytratt 5y ago
  Thanks so much for the positivity and suggestion! Unfortunately, it is not a priority for me right now to make an epub. Regarding puzzles, see tactics section. You surely have already found mountains of mate in 2 exercises somewhere... If not, https://ausee.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/23.pdf https://ausee.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/23.pdf
  - marttt 5y ago
    Ha, this will surely keep us busy for a while, thanks very much for that link. Btw, I already played several of your proposed Minigames with my son (8yo), and he was instantly hooked. Nice change from the regular games he insists on playing every night before bedtime. I think both your books are really well thought out and structured. Very encouraging and helpful for amateurs like us. Thanks again! Regarding the epub: turns out the layout of your pdfs is just fine to read on my e-reader's screen, so the epub definitely isn't crucial. I also quite like the books' clean and simple design.

160 points by andytratt 5y ago

This is great, it reminds me of an old Bobby Fischer book I had years ago that taught chess by studying endgames first, instead of openings, which is similar to these minigames. I like that these minigames are more focused on exploring chess, than just simulating possible endgames.

kqr 5y ago
That is an interesting idea! I wonder if it would work for go too. There are fewer rules to learn, but the situations can get rather complicated too.
- cjohnson318 5y ago
  There's a term for go minigames in Chinese, but I don't recall it. You might enjoy this site: https://senseis.xmp.net/?ProblemsAndExercises https://senseis.xmp.net/?ProblemsAndExercises
  - kqr 5y ago
    Tsumego is probably the term you are looking for. I have an app with lots of them on my phone. I was talking specifically about using them to teach the rules, which is not something I've heard of so far.
aasasd 5y ago
As a person perpetually stuck on the ‘total beginner’ phase, I really have no idea how one would start learning chess by beginning with openings. As I imagine it, one first learns to recognize good moves three levels forward, then four and five, until full positions start making sense quicker—and ‘endgames’ are a natural fit for this, since they involve just a few pieces and lead to an unambiguous checkmate. Puzzles, like in some phone apps, work pretty well this way. But openings are a complete opposite of this. (I mean, I understand that in any case one proceeds to learn the overall game by memorizing hundreds of openings and training to recognize patterns at once, and then by dumping full-time evenings into cranking up the rating. Which is why I decided that I'm fine with the beginner status.)
- xedrac 5y ago
  Memorizing openings is dubious at best, unless you're already a very strong player. Most chess coaches will actively discourage studying the opening until the you've become sufficiently good at the more impactful aspects of the game. Things like, awareness of the board, not hanging pieces, king safety, tactical pattern recognition, calculating 2-3 moves in advance with precision, attacking, defending, basic endgames, time management, basic strategy, and instincts. Memorization, without understanding, is mostly useless in Chess.
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Give Lichess a go (mobile or website). It's got unlimited puzzles and has helped me tremendously and doesn't get monotonous
- hardwaregeek 5y ago
  Ehh endgames can quickly go from easy, a beginner could do it, to insane theory that IMs struggle with. Mating with a Queen? Easy. Mating with a rook? Sure. Bishop knight? That’s pretty rough. Knight knight vs pawn? Even Hikaru struggles with that one in blitz.
andytratt 5y ago
thanks for the positive feedback! warms my heart <3 :)

raj2569 5y ago

This is awesome. Mini games are easy fun and very quick, and a great way to start chess!

andytratt 5y ago
thanks for the comment! super glad to hear about awesomeness :)

wyclif 5y ago

This is a helpful little book, so thanks @andytratt. One thing I think you should add in future editions is an illustration for en passant. You illustrate things like the knight move but IMO en passant is harder for beginners to understand without an illustration.

fvrghl 5y ago
Holy hell
- andytratt 5y ago
  indeed
  - wyclif 5y ago
    Sorry, my bad. I didn't think to look in the minigame section for the fundamental moves and assumed they were all in the front matter.
dragonwriter 5y ago
En passant is illustrated on p. 14, in the discussion of pawn movement in the Pawn Wars minigame.
- andytratt 5y ago
  Thanks you! Yes I intentionally buried the piece movement explanations after each minigame, trying to keep focus on the sequence of minigames and letting folks skip over the piece movements in case they already knew them a priori.

xedrac 5y ago

As a fellow lover of the game of Chess, and owner of several hundred Chess books, this is a great little starter book. I'm always fascinated at how Chess can completely satisfy my need for intellectual stimulation and competition, and it never gets old. It has the ultimate replay-ability factor. I fully expect to play and study the game for the rest of my life. Thank you for being delusional like me. :)

toomanydoubts 5y ago
>I'm always fascinated at how Chess can completely satisfy my need for intellectual stimulation and competition, and it never gets old. It has the ultimate replay-ability factor. I really love chess, gotten into it back in 2018 and learned a lot. Since mid 2020 I got into the bad habit of just playing 1+0 bullet games mindlessly without caring about the result just to shake off the boredom. Always repeating the same old openings and attempting the same old boring traps. I wish I could get back to that "never gets old plus ultimate replay-ability factor", maybe I should start taking on 15+15 games back again.
- raptorraver 5y ago
  I know what you mean, although my drug of choice is 3 minutes blitz. Lately I’ve gotten into letter chess on Lichess. It’s nice to be able to really analyze position and possible variations. Games last for days and weeks and you get emotionally committed to win those, or get even draw after horrible blunder.
- hutrdvnj 5y ago
  Often you don't have or don't want to spend the uninterrupted time to play a 15+15 match, this is why bullet and blitz are so popular. For those I recommend correspondence chess (e.g. on Lichess). This form of chess is asynchronously, so whenever you have some time, like waiting for the bus, you can deeply think about a chess position of your chess game. After a game I would recommend to analyze the game and learn from your mistakes in the opening, middlegame, endgame, missed tactics and so on. These games are much more meaningful than blitz games, where you obviously might have just lost a game due to a knight fork you hadn't seen because of few seconds left on your clock. Correspondence games will help you to understand chess more deeply, fix your own mistakes and to become an overall better player. You can also open many correspondence games in parallel, this way you don't have to wait for days until you can make another move.

infologics 5y ago

[dead]

raptorraver 5y ago

I’ve been trying to teach my 5 yo kid to play chess. He’s very enthusiastic but there seems to be so many things to learn so he sometimes feels overwhelmed. Today I’m going to test some of the minigames in the book! Very nice, thanks for the author :)

andytratt 5y ago
Yay! Good luck, hope it works out! If the enthusiasm can be channeled, then that's great. The minigames should keep him from getting overwhelmed. But 5 can be hard sometimes, and if focus isn't there yet, just wait a bit and try at 6 :) Thanks for commenting, makes me smile!

NKosmatos 5y ago

A nice small book to introduce someone to chess, especially the minigames. I’d like more of them. I know of one, but don’t know the name of it. You start with all black pieces on their positions and then with only one white knight (whoever you want, it’s symmetrical) you try to take all the black pieces in the lowest number of moves. My niece showed me this small exercise but I can’t recall the name if it and I was unable to find it online. On my todo list, to create a simple webpage with this mini game (along with other small/easy ones) where young players do practice and also keep their scores/time on a leaderboard per game ;-)

andytratt 5y ago
Thanks, amazing, yes please make interactive things!! I always wanted to turn this into a site and put more of them, but my limited programming patience only led to a basic diagram generator (http://andytrattner.com/chessboard/ http://andytrattner.com/chessboard/) for the written page :( Different configurations to hop knights around are great. I recall https://acornchess.com/ https://acornchess.com/ has some more of these. They didn't have cloud-based stuff nor social / leaderboards if I recall, it was all local desktop and behind paywall. The opportunity is there to create better things! P.S. this site also has some more stuffs - https://www.chessvideos.tv/endgame-training/endgame-simulations.php https://www.chessvideos.tv/endgame-training/endgame-simulati...

somenameforme 5y ago

For some more chess candy, here [1] is a video of Magnus Carlsen, current world champion (and arguably the strongest player of all time), playing a bunch of exceptionally strong players in a 2.5 hour blitz (3 minutes for each side) session while also giving some exceptionally insightful commentary. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjv1-14-SuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjv1-14-SuU

andytratt 5y ago
magnus is just magnificent

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago

"Even though chess has been around for well over a thousand years, good introductory teaching doesn't exist. So far, nobody has survived chess baptism without scars. Are you ready to join me in making history?" Hyperbole much? Guides, books, teachers have been around as long as chess have [1] so to suggest that none of these provide a 'good introductory teaching' is somewhat hubristic. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Ram%C3%ADrez_de_Lucena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Ram%C3%ADrez_de_Lucena

andytratt 5y ago
"Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. In rhetoric, it is also sometimes known as auxesis. In poetry and oratory, it emphasizes, evokes strong feelings, and creates strong impressions. As a figure of speech, it is usually not meant to be taken literally." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole) Yes, absolutely correct, I used hyperbole :) I kind of want to truncate my response to the above. I will respond in more detail, not to be defensive, but because perhaps there is a misunderstanding that can be rectified here. This expressive passage was not meant to convey hubris. I genuinely have yet to find a text which comprehensively introduces the game in a fun way, as mine does. You will see in other comments that folks often have chess sets lying around, but they struggle to engage those around them or teach the game engagingly. The tone of that paragraph is born from a very real, very modern, and very frustrating experience. Most books that "teach" chess are things like My System, which presumes some familiarity with the game and its rules, and is also just super dry. Josh Waitzkin's Attacking Chess was great as an intro to tactics, but not to the piece movements or chess itself as a whole. There are no other resources I have seen which effectively employ minigames, except perhaps IM Herman Grooten's recommended "Steps Method" (https://www.stappenmethode.nl/en/ https://www.stappenmethode.nl/en/). After speaking with IM Grooten, I decided that their approach, while great for the classroom and extremely comprehensive, is not encapsulated in a form that non-chess instructors would find worth paging through and implementing in their lives or with their loved ones. As an aside, I think Lucena's book was written so long ago that some of the rules (pawn double-step, en passant, long-range queen movement, castling) may not have been the same. I haven't read it, and I don't know anyone who has, so I can't say for sure. Wikipedia hints at this. I really can't say where the counterexample is, because I haven't found good introductory teaching. Lichess has great learning modules, which can take someone from zero knowledge to decent player in a great engaging way. But that's not well-explained to a parent or beginner who isn't quite self-motivated to dig through hardcore chess stuff on their own. For those in the autodidact demographic, my book is irrelevant for sure, and perhaps that includes you. Other resources those folks might find more useful (the kind who want lists of source material instead of some hubristic author opining) I have listed here: https://andytrattner.com/chess https://andytrattner.com/chess

erfgh 5y ago

I don't understand the appeal of chess for the average player. Unless you are advanced (over 2000 elo) there is nothing really "deep" about it. It's like solving simple puzzles and you have to think like a computer, simply evaluating moves and responses. As GM Ben Finegold said, when you show a sub-2000 player what he did wrong he's not surprised; he just didn't see it, didn't calculate it. Yes, if you reach 2000 elo the game becomes very strategic but 99% of people won't reach that due to not being able to play thousands and thousands of games and/or not doing so early enough in their life. Can you play just for fun when you are below 2000? Yes you can but it's not much fun because in most games players will blunder and at that point the game pretty much gets decided; you can blunder at any point, you can never relax, you can never play a move and be confident that you didn't blunder. The constant struggle to be ultra-focused on your calculation quickly wears you down and makes the game tiring and stressful.

Barrin92 5y ago
there's a lot of pleasure in mechanical exercise, it's the reason people go to the gym or play starcraft. You don't really need to be good at chess to get fun out of calculating chess moves. It's true that it's like solving puzzles, but puzzles are very popular! It's like working out for your brain. Even at the GM level by the way chess is really 99% tactics. It's not like some 4X strategy game, it's by its nature almost always concrete. And because everyone can blunder at low level play a blunder doesn't mean you lose the game. It's with higher ELO that the game starts to become more punishing. And you definitely can get to a good strength as an adult. 2000 is strong club level, which if you really want to do it is a few years of dedicated training. And even at your average club rating of say 1700-1800 you can play decent games.
thom 5y ago
On the one hand yes, I find chess a miserable hobby sometimes for these exact reasons. On the other hand, I think it’s been a hugely valuable life lesson and a boon to my focus and willpower. But I don’t understand how you can think chess isn’t satisfying to weaker players. An attack that comes off, even if it’s unsound, is one of the most beautiful things in gaming for me.
MagnumOpus 5y ago

tromp 5y ago

When teaching Go, a popular mini-game is capture-Go, with the winner being the first to capture an opponent's stone. But these Chess mini-games gave me an idea for an even simpler one. Starting from an empty board, place your stone so that it's not adjacent to any opponent stone. The first player unable to do so loses. I guess it could be called Avoid Contact. This is first of all a good way to learn the distinction between 4-connectedness and 8-connectedness., while avoiding the intricacies of captures. But it can also teach players a bit about forming territory, since building a chain 2 steps from the edge creates a safe space for your own stones. Now that I think about it, this is so obvious that it should already be known. If so, does anyone have a reference for it?

tromp 5y ago
Thinking about it some more, this game has a big flaw. One of the players has a simple winning strategy by mirroring (actually 180 degree rotation) the other player's moves. On an n x n board, the 1st player wins if n is odd (by starting in the middle), and the 2nd player wins if n is even. Changing to a rectangular m x n board, with m+n odd, doesn't help. The 1st player still wins by playing on one of the 2 central points followed by mirroring. While this flaw prevent Avoid Contact from being a good game in its own right, it still seems to make an excellent introduction to Go. Praised be those students that can discover the mirroring strategy by themselves. And then they will appreciate Go all the more as they learn how to defeat the mirroring strategy there... The next chance I get to teach someone Go, it will be in this order: Avoid Contact -> Capture Go -> Go
- tromp 5y ago
  There are some ways to deal with the mirroring flaw. The following assume odd-sized square boards. In one, the 1st player is forbidden from starting in the center. The other gives the 2nd player the option of switching sides after the first stone is played.
  - andytratt 5y ago
    nice

app4soft 5y ago

Tile should be next: > Chess Minigames for Enjoyable Learning (2021) [pdf]

andytratt 5y ago
got it, thanks, too late to modify it seems :(

mrpotato 5y ago

A year or two ago I bought my nephew a chess board/game and since then I've been struggling figuring out how I can teach him the game effectively. He seems to prefer playing on ipad/phone because he can see the legal moves. I'm going to use these mini games the next time we play to help him learn the piece movements a litle better. This is great!

andytratt 5y ago
yay!

marttt 5y ago

To OP: I was just looking into simple chess puzzles for my son (checkmate in two etc), so this popping up on HN front page is excellent. Many thanks for your work! Would you mind also providing an epub version of it? Apparently, there's also another booklet on your homepage, "How to Teach Your Child Chess" [1]. Will look into that one as well. 1: https://andytrattner.com/img/pdf/teach-chess.pdf https://andytrattner.com/img/pdf/teach-chess.pdf

andytratt 5y ago
Thanks so much for the positivity and suggestion! Unfortunately, it is not a priority for me right now to make an epub. Regarding puzzles, see tactics section. You surely have already found mountains of mate in 2 exercises somewhere... If not, https://ausee.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/23.pdf https://ausee.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/23.pdf
- marttt 5y ago
  Ha, this will surely keep us busy for a while, thanks very much for that link. Btw, I already played several of your proposed Minigames with my son (8yo), and he was instantly hooked. Nice change from the regular games he insists on playing every night before bedtime. I think both your books are really well thought out and structured. Very encouraging and helpful for amateurs like us. Thanks again! Regarding the epub: turns out the layout of your pdfs is just fine to read on my e-reader's screen, so the epub definitely isn't crucial. I also quite like the books' clean and simple design.